Stef's Blog - a native London Southlander and unrepentant 'Conspiraloon™' who doesn't trust anyone, not even himself. Sometimes I take pictures. I also enjoy swearing immensely and think much faster than I can type, so each post comes guaranteed to include at last one confusing typo. OK?

Monday, February 02, 2009

Best Windows joke ever?

26 comments:

paul
said...

Nope :p

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications qquipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window. Their sign read: "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER." The pilot smiled, waved, looked at her map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position. The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft building because, like their technical support, online help and product documentation, the response they gave me was technically correct, but completely useless."

2. Every time they painted new lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought "CarNT," but then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -- but it would only run on five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "general protect ion fault" warning light.

8. The airbag system would ask, "Are you sure?" before deploying.

9. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the antenna.

10. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

11. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

Heh. I can't say I've experienced any crashes since I last installed my customised version of Windows XP. An application might be poorly coded and crash\there might be a driver issue sometimes, but thats about it.

In fact if I didn't shut this down every night, I'd be into month 6 of uptime...

and if I ever feel the need to simulate the Vista experience I can always pull half the memory out of the machine and start some program to pointlessly encrypt and decrypt a few huge video files in the background whilst I try and do something else

there's something particularly annoying about the thought that M$ thought people would pay for their new O/S and higher specced machines to run it on - with all that higher spec ram and processor power soaked up to encrypt and decrypt data within the machine to stop people playing hooky disks

"For some reason you would simply accept this"

and, just for once, it looks like a lot of people had the sense not to play along

Most OEM machines are sold with Vista, its becoming increasingly difficult to buy a new one with XP. Which is a problem for the 80% of the market that are laymen as far as computer technology is concerned.

Meanwhile the "tech forum" brigade insist Vista is "faster, uses memory more efficiently, is more secure and isn't 7 years old".

Presumably Microsoft are hoping for better luck with Windows 7 (which would explain the name). It is still built around the Vista core though...

They're also halting support for Windows XP in June. Apparently this is a reason to jump to Vista or W7.

I had to laugh at this discussion regarding an older gaming PC with 1GB RAM:

"[quote IcE-ColD]Use XP. Vista will be too slow on that system.[end quote]

No, don't be silly. Vista will run fine on that spec, I've run it on lower."

Ha, he obviously hasn't seen how an average laptop struggles to start and run Vista smoothly..but then these guys are rich enough to be throwing money at 8GB RAM and other cutting edge components that provide marginal or no improvement.

I'm still using 2000 on a mighty p3 , and they are still patching that, so I think xp has a long way to go yet.You probably won't be able to pay ££ to phone up microsoft about it anymore, but that is a hardship worth enduring.

there's something particularly annoying about the thought that M$ thought people would pay for their new O/S and higher specced machines to run it on - with all that higher spec ram and processor power soaked up to encrypt and decrypt data within the machine to stop people playing hooky disks

"For some reason you would simply accept this"

and, just for once, it looks like a lot of people had the sense not to play along

No Stef, you got this backwards. Yes there is some (considerable) blame to be put upon M$. Do you think that M$ is putting features in its products (as in actually having to implement them, as in having to PAY for implementing them) just to annoy people? No, M$ does this to suck it up to the content industry - that is their advantage.

The problem is not M$, the problem is the content industry. The problem are these little discs that people still buy. Every time you go to the movies, you give money to the content industry which subsequently will use it to lobby for stricter copyright laws and will use it to lobby for more totalitarian surveillance laws. Remember, we have to log all internet traffic because of those pesky P2P-terrorists? Who do you think accomplished this? M$? The ISPs?

Yes, there are companies which should be starved to death, but M$ barely makes into the Top 10 - if at all.

Yes, there are companies which should be starved to death, but M$ barely makes into the Top 10 - if at all.

For sure

However, computers play an integral part of my life at the moment and heavy handed attempts to deny customers the choice of an established, mature product (XP) and force them over to an intrusive, restrictive, resource hungry pile of shit (Vista) does piss me off

M$ is a big multinational monopoly and like all multinational monopolists can go fuck itself

I'm not singling it out for any special consideration

And, looking on the bright side, the even bigger monopolist fuckers in the entertainment and news media are already dead - they just don't realise it yet

And, looking on the bright side, the even bigger monopolist fuckers in the entertainment and news media are already dead - they just don't realise it yet

They have quite a momentum, to still keep going. Reminds of the of those "How to ride a dead horse" jokes. While you can not ride a dead horse, you can still throw it quite some distance - given an adequate catapult.

My boss is using "Outlook Express" as a mail client on Windows XP - the email client included "for free" in Windows. Today I had to backup and move these mails to a new Windows XP installation, as the old one just "died". So I try to export the mails, only to get an unspecific error message. The problem is: You need to have "Outlook" (the email-client M$ sells you) installed to import&export mails in "Outlook Express"

I kid you not:If Outlook is not installed, and you start an import or export action, the necessary support files are not present for Outlook Express to complete the action. Then, you receive the following error message:The export could not be performed. An error occurred while initializing MAPI.> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/179637

What a piece of shite. I could almost understand why they do this (to force you to buy Outlook), but why this cryptic error message? Ahhhhhrgh! And my boss just doesn't want to use anything else than OE...

And oh, I forgot the best: if you want to make an backup of OE, you need to export these things seperatly:- Mails- Identities- Address book- Mail-rules> http://www.pchell.com/support/backupoe.shtml

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